Timing with lip synchs

I render most of my animations as png sequences (or rpf sequences) for later compositing in After Effects and final production with Adobe Premiere.

It's often a pain to get lip synchs lined back up properly, especially if I do tests with low frame rates.

Any standard way of dealing with this problem.

If it's just a character with no background, I could put markers in Carrara (off to the side with text labels or other symbols corresponding to start of a given word or phrase which I can then mask out later) - but for scenes where the background is utilized that wouldn't work.

If I render something from the beginning of a song or piece of dialogue, there's no lining up to be done, but for fragments of clips this is often a problem.

Thanks for any suggestions.

Comments

Normally you would render out the sequence at the same frame rate that you used when you created the lip sync.
that will maintain the timing.

If you change the frame rate of the animation,. then you'll be adding or skipping frames, which will put you out of sync with the vocal.
One of the main useful features of Mimic pro, is the ability to export a Preview AVI of the lip-sync (usually just a head shot) in draft open GL style render.

You should be able to do a low level render of your scene in carrara by using a different render output setting with No Anti-alias, and very low quality for all the other settings. . also making the image size smaller EG:320x240 will make those tests even faster.
You can scale those up, in AE, if needed.

that should allow you to have an accurate animation timing for "Test" renders, without changing the frame rate, and putting things out of sync.

If you have a segment of vocal /lip-sync which you want to render out separately, then you would use the time signature of the Audio and the video to sync those together.

In After Effects, you can expand the Audio tracks and See the waveform. and that can usually allow you to adjust the position of the video / animation, to get the timing right.
You can also use the Ram Preview to playback the combined Audio and video in Ram, then adjust as required.
Once you're happy, you can "pre-compose" that section, then it should be easier to add that into a longer section.

I actually find Carrara Mimic lipsync ever so slightly lags, I fix it by noting the exact length of the wav file and in virtualdub framerate using match length to sound file.
It is nowhere near as bad as Cam studio or my webcam stream for example but on a very long sequence can be noticed near the end.
my voice narrating in this video an example where I had to do it both on the Cam studio screen capture of me browsing Youtube comments and then the subsequent Mimic of V4 Faceshop Wendy http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd8Ib0PGCqU but as I said, a very long example, short clips it is negligable. it is usually about 30.something fps as opposed to 30fps so not a huge difference.